Generating solutions

The emergence of new genomics technologies has been a key driver towards the development of personalized medicine to deliver a treatment tailored to the patient’s needs.

Mass spectrometry (MS) offers new perspectives in personalized medicine by providing a high throughput technology, enabling the identification and the profiling of mutations in patient specimens. However, the instrument performance has been mitigated by the overwhelming sample complexity that limits the comprehensiveness and dynamic range of MS analyses.

Recent work conducted by Thermo Fisher Scientific and the lab of Dr. Pierre Thibault of the Université de Montréal has pointed toward a way to overcome these limitations, by combining a new form of ion mobility to MS. Now they are building on this work to deliver a new instrument to identify subtle mutations in individual patients’ cancer cells, an application of significance to cancer immunotherapy.

This new technology could lead to a transformation in discovering and targeting disease-relevant biomarkers from human cancer cells, providing intellectual property that can be a source of revenue generation from licensing fees, as well as increased sales of this new form of mass spectrometry. The result will be new platforms to accelerate discoveries in health and medical research that will benefit Canadians.